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Cameron Stewart's Detailed Article

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Cameron Stewart's Detailed Article How I was drawn into toxic police politics BY:CAMERON STEWART, ASSOCIATE EDITOR From:The Australian December 15, 2012 12:00AM Police in Pinaroo Circuit, Melbourne, where one of the terror raids took place on August 4, 2009. Picture: David Geraghty Source:The Australian IT began as no more than a modest tip-off. I pushed my coffee aside, pulled some post-it notes from my pocket and started scribbling. On the other side of the table Victoria Police detective senior constable Simon Artz spoke quietly as he watched boats glide along the Yarra River opposite our spot at the Southbank's Bear Brass cafe. It was 10.30am on July 30, 2009. I scrawled down the words "Somalia," "terror funding", "Australian Federal Police" and "raids." By the time we finished our coffee the policeman had outlined the bare bones of an interesting news story, but little more. As I then understood it, the AFP and Victoria Police were preparing to launch raids on a small group of Somali and Middle Eastern men in Melbourne suspected of providing funding to the radical terror group Al-Shabab in Somalia. For my newspaper, The Australian, it was a good story, but not a huge scoop, because it related to support for a terror group in distant Africa rather than a here-and-now terror threat in Australia. Neither Artz nor I had an idea that we had already set off a chain of events which would ultimately end his police career and contribute indirectly to the demise of Victoria Police chief commissioner Simon Overland and the state's police watchdog, the Office of Police Integrity. UNKNOWN to me, when I met Artz for coffee that day, a top secret counter-terror investigation was coming to a head behind closed doors inside the AFP, Victoria Police and ASIO. Called Operation Neath, it was the second largest counter-terror operation in Australia's history. It had begun seven months earlier when authorities had intercepted a phone call in Melbourne's west between an Australian- Lebanese man and a Somali man. They were heard discussing how to send some Australians to Somalia to fight but the plot later morphed into something far more frightening, when they and a group of hardline Islamic friends in Melbourne decided instead to launch a suicide attack on Sydney's Holsworthy Army base. Investigators who eavesdropped on their plans were horrified. Now the police were preparing to swoop and the raids across Melbourne were tentatively planned for the following Tuesday, August 4. A week earlier, I had returned from holiday to find an email sent to me by Artz with a New York Times article "A call to Jihad, Answered in America," about the radicalisation of Somalis in the US. I had known the policeman for several years. He worked for Vic Pol's Special Intelligence Group focusing on African communities, especially the sometimes volatile Somali community. We were not friends but we had mutual areas of interest and would catch up for an occasional coffee or lunch to swap tales about police politics, terrorism and Africa. He gave me a few minor stories and once allowed me to quote him by name, but mostly we just chatted. When I received Artz's email, I became curious. We had an exchange of messages where he hinted that something was happening and that while he couldn't tell me much, he was happy to meet for coffee. When we met on that Thursday morning Artz was relaxed and jovial. He told me that raids were planned for the following week aimed at catching a group suspected of funding Al-Shabab, but did not say anything about a plot to attack an Australian army base. I thanked him for the tip and told him I would need to run it past the AFP to seek their comment before I wrote the yarn. We left on good terms, and I attended another meeting before arriving back into the office at around lunchtime. I knew the AFP would be slow to respond to a request for comment so I called their spokesman in Canberra early and gave them a rough outline of what I knew and asked for comment, either on or off the record. Almost immediately I could sense alarm in the voice of the AFP spokesman. I was puzzled -- this was not a big story in the relative scheme of national security reporting. What was the fuss? Before long the AFP spokesman was asking if I would consider holding the story because to publish it might jeopardise the investigation. I told him The Australian would never publish anything that would jeopardise an investigation but that he would need to talk with the editor or editor-in-chief who had the final say on the publication of stories. Shortly afterwards the then acting AFP chief Tony Negus rang the then editor Paul Whittaker to urge him to hold my story. Negus told Whittaker that The Australian only had a small part of the Operation Neath story and that to publish it the next day could cost lives. He offered no further details but Whittaker quickly agreed not to run the story. Negus then offered to give me a full briefing on Neath, promising that we could run the story as soon as it was safe to do so. I flew to AFP headquarters in Canberra the next day and was ushered into a room with three senior AFP officers. I had barely pulled out my notebook when they told me that Neath involved a plot by extremists to launch a suicide attack on the Holsworthy army base. The aim of these would-be terrorists, they said, was to kill as many soldiers as they could before they themselves were killed. I was stunned. Clearly I had only learned a small part of a much bigger story. I was also instantly worried for Artz. He had chosen to arrange our tip-off meeting via police email. Neither of us was concerned about this fact at the time, because we had no concept of the gravity of Operation Neath. I knew from my previous reporting on terror-related issues that the story Artz had told me was not big enough to trigger a witch-hunt. But the belated discovery of the deadly Holsworthy plot made an investigation likely and had caught us both out. Had he known that this was a far bigger story I'm sure Artz would have never left an obvious email trail. I HELD on to the explosive story of the Holsworthy terror plot for the next four days. At around 7pm on the evening of Monday August 3, a senior AFP officer called me at home and gave permission for The Australian to print my stories on Neath the next morning when the police raids were due to take place. I slept fitfully until the alarm went off at 5am. Lying in bed I held my breath as the radio news headlines were read out. The lead story was that police had raided several homes across Melbourne apprehending at least four men on suspicion of being involved in a terrorist plot. I finally breathed out. The raids appeared to have gone off without a hitch. I texted an AFP spokesman to ask how it had all gone, but his reply surprised me. His text said something like "papers came out too early causing security problems for us." I was puzzled. The Australian had promised the AFP it would run the stories in its last editions. I had told the AFP, verbally and in writing, to double check production times with my editors so there were no misunderstandings. The Australian kept its side of the deal by printing the stories in its final editions but it turns out that the AFP never made the call to clarify these printing times. The police had also not told us what time the raids would take place. Unknown to the editors, police chose the relatively late time of 4.30am to conduct the raids. The combination of these factors meant that several hundred copies of the paper's final edition which had my stories on the front page were available before the raids were carried out. I called a senior AFP officer and asked what had happened. He said the raids had gone off without a hitch but that Victoria Police were furious about the early publication of the story. The AFP also said Vic Pol were also furious about the AFP decision to brief The Australian about the raids. Even though the raids had been successful and the suspects had all been arrested without incident, the real drama was yet to begin. At the joint press conference with Negus and Victoria Police chief commissioner Simon Overland in Melbourne, Overland took a hefty swing at the newspaper, effectively accusing it of breaking its word with the AFP. "I am concerned that despite those negotiations copies of that paper I'm told were available on the streets here in Melbourne at 1.30am this morning, well before the warrants were actually executed," he said. "This in my view represents an unacceptable risk to the operation, an unacceptable risk to my staff." In fact a senior policeman later confided to The Australian that there was no danger because police already had the suspects' houses surrounded, were monitoring any communications between them and knew they were unarmed. Overland's anger was trumped up to send a message to the AFP, which Overland believed may have botched its deal with the newspaper.
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